Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I’m going to tell you about an artist who dissects our era with the precision of a scalpel and the elegance of a cursed poet. Issy Wood, born in 1993 in the United States, is not simply a painter – she is the anatomist of our contemporary neuroses, the chronicler of our consumerist obsessions, and the revealer of our deepest anxieties.
In her London lair, Wood creates paintings that are like distorting mirrors of our society, where luxury mingles with the abject in a macabre dance. Her oil paintings on velvet plunge us into a universe where everyday objects take on an unsettling aura, like material ghosts of our unfulfilled desires. Porsche leather interiors become padded mortuary chambers, collector’s watches transform into modern memento mori, and porcelain services remind us of the fragility of our bourgeois traditions with biting irony.
Wood’s work engages in a striking dialogue with Jean Baudrillard’s thoughts on hyperreality and consumer society. Her paintings are populated with simulacra – those copies without originals which, according to the French philosopher, now constitute our reality. Take, for example, her paintings of luxury car interiors: they are not so much representations of automobiles as portraits of our collective desire, mediated by advertising and social networks. Wood masterfully exposes how these objects of desire have become contemporary fetishes, totems of social status that no longer have any connection to their primary function. These gleaming vehicles, frozen in their velvety splendor, become the reliquaries of our social ambitions.
This approach finds particular resonance in her series of paintings of teeth and dental appliances, where the artist explores beauty standards imposed by an appearance-obsessed society. Wood transforms these clinical images into contemporary vanitas, recalling the memento mori of 17th-century Flemish painting. But where Dutch masters used skulls to symbolize mortality, Wood employs gold-crowned molars and ceramic bridges to evoke our own fragility. Wood’s works point to another form of vanity: that of our consumer society, where objects become markers of a social identity constantly threatened by obsolescence. These works echo Roland Barthes’ critique of modern mythologies, where dental care becomes a social ritual, a mark of class distinction rather than a simple medical necessity. The open mouth, exposed in all its medical vulnerability, becomes under her brush the symbol of a society that forces us to smile even in pain.
In her series of paintings on velvet, Wood uses the very texture of the support as a metaphor for our relationship with luxury and seduction. The recurring use of velvet as a support is not just an aesthetic choice: it’s a conceptual statement that runs through her entire body of work. This material, historically associated with power and wealth, becomes under Wood’s brush the very symbol of our ambiguous relationship with luxury. The silky texture of velvet creates an artificial depth that attracts the gaze while maintaining a frustrating distance, like those objects of desire that obsess us but never bring the promised satisfaction. This tension between surface and depth becomes a metaphor for our society of spectacle, where appearance takes precedence over essence. This sophisticated pictorial technique recalls Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the aura of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction. Wood succeeds in the tour de force of creating works that, while criticizing our consumer society, possess their own magnetic aura. Velvet thus becomes the ideal medium for exploring this tension between attraction and repulsion that characterizes our relationship with luxury objects.
The artist constantly plays on this ambivalence between attraction and repulsion. Her still lifes of collectibles and luxury goods are painted with almost surgical precision, but their tight framing and claustrophobic atmosphere create a palpable unease. This tension perfectly reflects our complex relationship with consumerism: we are both seduced by these objects of desire and aware of their fundamental emptiness. Leather jackets, precious watches, antique porcelains become almost threatening objects under her gaze, as if their power of seduction concealed a form of symbolic violence. Wood manages to create a unique aesthetic that marries the grotesque and the sublime, the banal and the precious. Her paintings are both sociological documents and autonomous artworks, capable of fascinating us while making us uncomfortable. The padded leather of luxury cars, painted with disturbing sensuality, evokes both comfort and confinement. These luxurious cabins become time capsules, enclosed spaces where a form of social theater plays out. The artist perfectly captures this particular atmosphere of high-end cars, where luxury is tinged with a certain claustrophobia. The reflections on leather, chrome details, curves of seats are all elements that contribute to creating an atmosphere that is both attractive and oppressive. The artist thus forces us to face our own fascination with these objects of desire, while showing us their mortiferous dimension.
In her self-portraits and representations of female figures, Wood explores themes of identity and gender through the prism of consumer society. Faces are often partially masked or fragmented, as if to suggest the impossibility of an authentic identity in a world dominated by images and appearances. These works echo Judith Butler’s theories on gender performativity, showing how social norms and cultural expectations shape our self-presentation. Face masks, sunglasses, fashion accessories become protective layers behind which hides a fundamental vulnerability.
The sonic dimension of her work, through her musical practice, adds an additional layer to her social critique. Her electronic compositions, with their acerbic lyrics and deconstructed melodies, function as a dystopian soundtrack for her paintings. This multidisciplinary approach reinforces her position as a critical observer of our time, capable of deconstructing contemporary mythologies through different mediums. Her music, like her painting, plays on contrasts and tensions, creating a sonic universe where unease mingles with seduction.
The artist does not merely criticize our consumer society: she reveals its deep psychological mechanisms. Her paintings explore how luxury objects are invested with an almost magical power, becoming talismans meant to protect us from our own insignificance. This approach recalls Georges Bataille’s analyses of unproductive expenditure and modern potlatch, where ostentatious consumption becomes a social ritual designed to affirm our status. The objects she paints are thus charged with a double value: they are both commodities and fetishes, consumer goods and objects of worship.
The temporal dimension is also central to Wood’s work. Her paintings of vintage objects and outdated luxury goods suggest an archaeology of the present, as if she were collecting artifacts of our time to present them to a future that will find them as strange as we find relics of the past. This temporal dimension gives her work a melancholic depth that transcends simple social criticism. The objects she paints already seem to be vestiges of a bygone era, as if our present were already becoming history.
The influence of digital technology is also palpable in her work, particularly in her way of framing objects and playing with textures. Her paintings sometimes seem like painted screenshots, as if she were documenting our mediated relationship with reality. This digital aesthetic, translated into the traditional medium of oil painting, creates a fascinating disconnect that makes us aware of our own alienation. Wood thus perfectly captures our era where reality is constantly mediated by screens and digital images.
Her artistic practice also questions the boundaries between different mediums. In addition to her painting, Wood expresses herself through music and writing, creating a coherent universe where each medium enriches the others. Her texts, often autobiographical, reveal an acute awareness of the contradictions of our time, while her music explores the same themes as her painting but in a more direct, more visceral mode. This multidisciplinary approach demonstrates a desire to grasp our era in all its complexity, to multiply viewpoints to better reveal its paradoxes.
Through her work, Wood poses a fundamental question: how to maintain a critical position in the face of a system that absorbs and commodifies all forms of contestation? Her answer seems to lie in the very ambiguity of her work, which is situated neither in pure celebration nor in simple denunciation, but in an uncomfortable in-between that forces us to question our own desires and our own contradictions. This complex position makes her work one of the most pertinent explorations of our contemporary condition.
Issy Wood’s work presents itself as a distorting mirror of our time, reflecting our collective obsessions and anxieties. Through her painting, she manages to create a unique visual language that marries social criticism and formal exploration. Her work invites us to reflect on our relationship with objects, luxury, and our own identity in a world saturated with manufactured images and desires. The strength of her art lies in its ability to seduce us while destabilizing us, to attract us while repelling us, thus creating a space for critical reflection on our contemporary condition. In a world where criticism often seems powerless against the force of the system it denounces, Wood finds an original way to make us see our reality differently, to make us feel the weight of the objects that surround us and define us despite ourselves.
